LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






y tuztCQj2v7^t 




God Cares for Our Dead. 



J$ermon 

/ 

By DAVID SWING, 

PASTOR OF CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO. 



V 






\ 






November 9, 1890. 






■ 9 1891 



PUBLISHED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION 

By William A. Talcott, 

OF ROCKFORD, ILL, 






• 







Copyright 1891, by Wm. A. Talcott. 



QOD is caring for all our dead. They go from 

us, but not from Him." 

— Swing 



Dear Friends, 

Mr. and Mrs. Talcott : 

Of course I can have no objection 
to your publishing any of my discourses which may con- 
tain some word of comfort to those who are mourning 
over their dead. Your own home has met with such sad 
losses, that if any hearts know what words are full of 
comfort, your hearts must be stored with that sad ability. 
I wish the whole public could know with what resignation 
and peace you have passed from the tears of the grave back 
to every form of human and Christian duty. 

It is the mistake often of those who have lost some 
loved one to think that they must attempt to recover from 
the awful shock and separation. No educated mind ought 
ever to recover fully from such wounds of the spirit. 
When a child or near one by blood or by a divine friendship 
goes away from us, the mourning should continue while life 
lasts. Are we to suppose that Edmund Burke ever forgot 
for a day the death of his son ? Did Hallam feel for a few 
months only the absence of his idolized boy? The tears 
must last while the absence continues. Nothing but the 
meeting in immortality should end the long pensive remem- 
brance. The sad memories which death brings are a part of 
our education. Under that influence of an absent soul the 
heart softens, and man goes forth each day more of a 
friend to his race, and more of a worshiper of his God. 
The death of a friend exalts those who remain to weep. 
(5) 



But this grief must not interfere with the duties and 
noble pursuits of our world. Sorrow must ennoble duty, 
not end it. Earth's blossoms must still be beautiful even 
after they have wreathed a dead forehead. We must so feel 
that death is a part of God's plan and God's love, that the 
grave of a lost one must seem attached to the work we are 
to do while we remain in these sunbeams. These tombs and 
these duties are entangled. We cannot separate them. Our 
sorrows, our joys and our duties are inseparable. We cannot 
put asunder what God has thus joined. May all who mourn 
have such a faith in the teachings of our common religion 
that each absent one may make duty more sacred, happiness 
higher and deeper, and heaven nearer. 
With much love, 

Yours as ever, 

David Swing. 
Chicago, February 23, 1891 



^ermon. 



Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the 
corn. Is it for the oxen that God careth? or saith 
he it wholly for our sake? _/ Corinthians ix. 9. 

The Mosaic law was cheered not a little by sunny 
spots of benevolence. The advance of the virtues 
and amenities has not been with equal step. Sol- 
diers, under severe discipline, march with an even 
front ; but when men or children are crossing a field 
on a holiday, no line of advance is observed. Some 
run, some attempt to walk the most slowly possible. 
The virtues thus advance. The movement is infor- 
mal. Some forms of good are running far in 
advance of the other forms. Some are far along 
toward perfection, while other forms of culture or 
love are in the first stages of life. 

Thus some parts of the old Hebrew laws were 
full of wrath, while other parts were rich in mercy. 
A rebellious child must be stoned to death ; an infi- 
del must be killed ; a witch must not be permitted 
to live ; a slave might be whipped to death ; but in 



8 

contrast with such bloody statutes lay the laws that 
some figs and grapes and bunches of wheat should be 
left for the poor who should glean the fields after the 
harvest ; that all men and domestic animals should 
rest one day in seven ; that no young man should 
be called upon to go to war in the first year after his 
wedding ; and every eighth year was to be one long 
holiday for the fields, and the men and animals 
which toiled on the land. At the end of every 
seventh year came this magnificent vacation for all 
the rural populace. " Bloody Moses " was also kind 
and loving Moses in some hours. The oxen which 
were compelled to go round and round, tramping out 
the wheat, must not wear muzzles. They must be 
permitted to have their mouths full of the new straw 
and new grain. As they had plowed the field and 
had helped in all things between the seed time and 
the reaping, it was but justice that when the thresh- 
ing day had come the ox might take up a mouthful 
of the sweet stuff. The Mosaic age was cruel, but 
it was illumined by bright spots. 

St. Paul said this law of oxen came from God 
to Moses ; but not on account of the oxen at all, 
but only to typify through those dumb brutes God's 



care for man. Paul said : Does God care for oxen ? 
He gave the law for man's sake alone. 

It is much to be regretted, perhaps, that the 
Pauls and the St. Johns were not made immortal, 
so that we could, at any time, ask them what they 
meant by certain words and phrases. Paul's Greek, 
" He made the law wholly (pantos) on account of 
of us," needs some explanation, for our age does 
not feel that God exhausts his regards upon man, 
and cares nothing about the condition of the ox. 
Our period thinks of an infinite love, and knows 
that after God has cared for the human family there 
is some solicitude left for the great animal world. 

Moses and Paul have at least furnished to us an 
illustration of the care that envelops the human 
race. In the autumn days when out in the open 
air, upon the good, dry, earthen threshing-floor, the 
oxen were separating the wheat from the straw, God 
stood by to order that no muzzle should come be- 
tween the mouth and the food. That law came 
more directly from heaven than other of the 
Hebrew statutes. It carries the marks of a divine 
and perpetual goodness. It possesses a beauty that 
will never fade. If in our egotism we assume that 



10 

heaven loves us more than it loves the brute king- 
dom, our weakness is pardonable, for the Bible itself 
says a man is of more value than many sparrows. 
God cares for man. 

What a deep and sweeping truth it is when any- 
body or any creature cares for us! And if this 
great scene is all perfected by the fact that God also 
cares for us, then what a world we have in which to 
live and die ! 

When philosophers have attempted to define 
civilization, they have come short as often as they 
have attempted to fashion it out of learning or art 
or law or politeness, but when, at last, they begin to 
mix into the crucible the element of care for all 
other mortals, and for all forms of life, they reach 
a more perfect definition. Civilization is more of 
the heart than of the mind. At least the powers of 
the mind are most valuable when they inflame the 
soul. If one cannot possess both learning and 
kindness he would better pray for the kindness. 
Cicero said, " Friendship can make riches splendid." 
Friendship can plan and do so many things for its 
wealth to execute. It can plan a good winter even- 
ing for a group, and it can plan an afternoon for a 



11 



hundred children. It can roll in a Christmas log 
for a larger hearth. It can spread happiness to the 
right and left. It can spend money most beauti- 
fully and make gold shine. But what is friendship 
but another name for that care which in the Mosaic 
age left some sheaves in the field and some grapes 
in the vineyard. 

We are all so accustomed to the great atmos- 
phere of friendship that we live unconscious of its 
worth. When a man has suddenly lost his good 
name he realizes what it once was to have the world 
love him. He did not know until that black hour 
what a happiness lay in the common good morn- 
ings spoken to him in the street. Viewed from the 
new disgrace, each smile from a business man, a 
woman, or a child seems to have been richer than a 
bed of violets. Man could, perhaps, bear the loss 
of his own love of others, but he cannot bear the 
thought that all have ceased to love him. Reared 
in this climate of kind regard, man little realizes 
what a vernal air it is. Gentle as our material 
atmosphere is in action, it presses with a force of 
fourteen pounds upon the square inch. It is not felt 
by even a rose leaf or a butterfly's wing, because, 



12 

being a fluid, it presses equally in all directions. No 
cheek of infant feels its weight. Just so gentle is 
the common esteem that encompasses the human 
race. It is more powerful in highly civilized lands, 
but in the pagan nations it exists and makes the 
Chinaman worship the very bones of his ancestors, 
and makes the exile wish to return and die in his 
native land. He wishes even his grave to be cared 
for by relatives and friends. To care for others is 
benevolence and love ; to be cared for is the desire 
of all human nature. 

The play of King Lear illustrates the dreadful 
lot of that heart which has fallen out of the world 
of regard. Avarice and wicked intrigue closed 
against the king all the doors which had once 
swung open at love's touch. The awful storm in 
the woods at night which beat upon the head, not 
only uncrowned but uncared for and white with old 
age, is a fit emblem of the darkness and tempest in 
the spirit when its friends are all lost. Cordelia 
stands beautifully for that loving care which creates 
the vital air which all souls must breathe that they 
may live. The Greek drama taught the same 
sacred lesson in the Antigone who stood by her 



13 

blind father when all other human beings had de- 
serted him. The more cruel became the world's 
neglect, the nearer the daughter drew to the friend- 
less OEdipus. After the lightning and the awful 
thunder had slain the father, then the loving girl 
reappeared in the heroic act of caring for the dead 
body of her brother, which body a despotic king 
had ordered to be made food for the swine and the 
vultures. Thus, the English genius and the Greek 
genius, living more than two thousand years apart, 
saw with equal clearness the beauty of a world 
where many care for each one, and the deep mis- 
fortune of the being for whom no one cares. Past 
fame and past empire offer no consolation to the 
heart which says, " No one cares for me." If the 
Greek Antigone is the best woman that has ever 
been seen upon any stage, ancient or modern, it is 
chiefly because she stands for the most powerful of 
all truths and thoughts,— some one cares deeply for 
me. 

The reformers of all the lowest classes expect 
many a ruined mind to awake and rise in a new 
life when it is touched by this magic wand of out- 
side esteem. The abandoned boy or girl becomes 



14 

ambitious for good as soon as either learns that 
kind eyes are watching and praying. While there 
is no chemistry that can weigh and measure senti- 
ments, it seems probable that the thought, " I love 
another," is not so inspiring as the thought that 
another loves me. Whether this emotion comes in 
childhood or in old age, or in that youthful hour 
which is the most deeply covered with all the vines 
and blossoms of sentiment, it is perhaps the most 
influential thought which lives within the spirit's 
temple.. When Marquette revealed his care for the 
Indians they became transformed. No red man 
in the mountains, no negro in Africa or in foreign 
bondage, can resist the power of this solicitude. It 
undermines like a wave ; it rends like an earthquake ; 
it melts like a fire ; it inspires like music ; it binds 
like a chain ; it detains like a good story ; it cheers 
like a sunbeam. 

When great criminals have been detected in 
their career they all grieve that their mothers shall 
now know the truth; grieve, not because they 
love their mothers, but because the mothers love 
them; that her admiration can follow them no 
more. That esteem, present in all the days of 



15 

infancy, ever present in manhood, assumed still all 
through the period of time, must now cease as an 
admiration, and exist only as a pity and a grief. 
This truth and consolation that some fellow-beings 
are caring for us is thus reaching upward from 
where the oxen are treading out the wheat, to where 
man is passing life as a poor laborer, as a rich man 
or as a king. No heart can escape it. The infer- 
ence is, therefore, that all the forms of life are 
deserving of some one's regard. It is not only 
your happiness to be cared for by others, but it is 
also your right. The right to light, air and liberty is 
not more real than this right to a share in the great 
omnipresent solicitude. It is not a right which one 
would care to present before a legislature for the 
purpose of securing a law, or before a court for the 
purpose of securing a decision, but still it is a right 
which not only envelops infancy and the barefoot 
school -boy, but also all the manhood and woman- 
hood upon our globe. It is very silent, but very real. 
In all our admiration and study of material 
nature we are all struck by the one defect present 
everywhere, in hill and valley, rainbow and dewdrops, 
sky and ocean, cataract and meadow brook, — a 



16 

defect carried in each golden cloud, borne along 
in each perfumed wind, hidden in the leaves of 
each rose, where the trees rise to the height of 
three hundred feet, where the rocks rise in sub- 
limity, and the natural garden below lies in the 
beauty of a terrestrial paradise, there lies this defect 
of nature, never absent from a city, or a star, the 
defect that nature does not care for you. Nature 
is unable to care for man. The hills in spring or 
autumn will not speak to you; the flowers are 
beautiful but heartless. They would as soon deco- 
rate man's grave as his cradle. The hand of the 
bride and the bosom of the dead are both one and 
the same to the violets. According to the rich 
eloquence of William Wirt, the wife of Blenner- 
hasset wept on her lovely island, tears which her 
own house could not pity, tears which, in the 
winter's wind, " froze as they fell." While the 
exiles are journeying to Siberia or are passing long 
years in a living death, the forms and forces of 
nature have never come with a sympathetic word 
or deed. Home and exile are one with it. Often 
while a ship load of people is sinking in the ocean, 
the sun is smiling sweetly on the waters, and the 



17 

" countless smiles of the sea" are playing on in 
presence of weeping faces that will wear no smile 
again forever. Roses grow red and fragrant on the 
dust of our dead. 

The dominating care which so creates and 
charms humanity must, therefore, have come from 
some source apart from material nature, and must be 
expected to approach man through some intellect- 
ual or spiritual gate. It must come from some- 
thing that can form attachments, that can pity, 
love, and express these emotions. It must, thus, 
come from mind to the thrashing oxen and to the 
higher mind of man. The universe must possess 
something that can care for all that lives and can 
suffer. The summer does not wish to come to our 
world; the orange does not wish to ripen; the 
flowers do not wish to be fragrant ; the apples do 
not wish to grow red and sweet ; the air does not 
wish to be changed into music ; the autumn woods 
do not desire to be beautiful. The wish is else- 
where. There must be a great Care that is detached 
from nature, a sympathy that belongs to an intel- 
lectual life, a Care that makes nature its instrument 
and language. Some heart is back of the scene. 



18 

The relations of man to the lower forms of 
animal life bear witness to the fact of some omnip- 
otent regard and to man's need of that regard. It 
is not man's vanity which makes him say, my 
horse or my dog loves me. He could say, I love 
my horse or my dog ; but that form of expression 
would not be so far-reaching and pathetic as the 
truth and feeling that some creature loves him. 
Man can love the hills or love music, but the hills 
and music cannot love him in return. What 
touches the heart most is the thought that it is cared 
for. Therefore, said the Great Shepherd, " My> 
sheep hear my voice." " They follow me." Henri- 
Frederic Amiel says in his journal, " Nothing will 
induce my cat to leave me. She has followed me 
from room to room all the day. A look, a word 
gratifies him." Amiel also says, " If man were 
what he ought to be he would be adored by all 
the domestic animals ; " thus reminding us that 
man thinks much of all the kind regards sent him 
from the brute world. He wishes the birds and 
beasts to lend him their good wishes. Man seems 
to be the needy one. In the little poem written 
by Catullus to the dead sparrow of a girl, the 



19 

virtues of the bird lay in its devotion to the girl. 
It knew the girl as well as the girl knew her mother. 
It fluttered around the girl's head ; it nestled in her 
bosom ; it chirped for her alone. Catullus mourned 
that such a sympathizing creature had gone from 
the world by that " path along which no life can 
return." Similar virtue had Ovid's parrot and 
Virgil's oxen. The charm was not that man loved 
them, but that they loved man. In an old engrav- 
ing called " The Doves," the birds are revealing 
the greater part of the attachment. They are on 
the head, the shoulders, the hands, and around the 
feet of the ideal girl. They cared for her. 

Whoever will read all these poems of the world 
and study all those pictures will find that the theme 
in the lessons is that man dwells upon the star which 
needs sympathy as much as it needs sunlight ; and 
that he accepts of the attentions of the humblest 
creatures, not because he is an egotist, but because 
he is the victim of a mighty sorrow. When Pascal 
said that " All animals die, but man is the only ani- 
mal that knows that it will die," the only animal 
that looks far forward to that strange event, he 
touched upon the fact that man is forever in need 



20 

of helping hands and voices. Humanity plays and 
laughs, and yet its oceans and continents are not 
half as large as its griefs. It has lived encompassed 
by a black cloud. When Justice Miller lay stricken, 
a distinguished man went up to the home of the 
failing judge to bear love and hopes, but the visitor 
died before the great jurist himself passed away. 
Last summer a family, all bound together by love, 
made a journey of pleasure from the South to the 
New England coast. When in sight of the blue 
ocean, and when all hearts were glad, they were 
overtaken by one of earth's hidden calamities, and 
suddenly six of the household had gone from this 
world. No merit, no friendship, no beauty, no 
attachments availed to keep them in this life upon 
earth. For thousands of years this mystery of 
death has been pursuing mankind, mowing down 
the living, thinking, and loving children as autumn 
leaves. Death contemplates still other campaigns. 
He contemplates a forward movement which will 
make this generation all pass away from the world 
it so loves. Death loves history more than he loves 
poetry ; his sculpture is all monuments of the past ; 
his favorite piece of ground is " God's acre ; " his 



21 

favorite time is the night ; his favorite music is a 
dirge ; his color is black. 

Man may be great in mind, in skill, or in wealth, 
and yet his situation is most pathetic. All that 
pathos which is so precious in music comes into art 
from the pathos in man's life. The tears in music 
relate it to humanity. All hearts love it because 
it weeps with them. We cannot say to music, 
" We have mourned and you would, not lament." 
It has no will of its own. It does nothing but 
blend with the pensiveness of the soul. 

Humanity thus is asking for sympathy. Educa- 
tion does not cure its pain ; rather it doubles it and 
makes the condition of man more pitiful to a cul- 
tured mind than it is to an unlettered Indian. With 
the deepening of civilization the cry will deepen, 
Who cares for man ? Who will help him ? Is 
there some great sympathy in which he lives and in 
which he will die ? Is there some love above these 
elegant forms of life, saying, "Thou shalt not 
silence the heart that is threshing the grain of this 
world. Is there some higher law passed for man ? 
Thou shalt not reward the ear with deafness nor the 
eye with blindness, nor love with death." Perhaps 



11 

that law of the threshing floor expands and takes in 
all of us children who would gladly fill our mouths 
with the fresh harvest of a second life. 

This the student of our world perceives, — that 
while nature has no sympathy for man, while the 
ocean would as soon drown a child as float a log, 
yet through this same nature there beams a solicitude 
not its own. Some mind wishes the fruits to ripen 
for man, the birds to sing for him, and for him the 
great scenes of utility and beauty to pass along in 
their marvelous procession. A very large part of 
all the visible things from the stars to the soil of the 
field speaks in tones of sympathy, and says, Some 
one cares for man. Each useful thing, each happy 
thing, each beautiful thing is a word in the great 
language of helpfulness, and all joined together 
they make an eloquent plea within the blessed field 
of optimism. The situation of man is peculiar in 
this, that all the surrounding air pities his misfor- 
tunes. Not the air, indeed, but something that works 
in it and through it. As on the dangerous shore of 
the stormy sea great lights shine all night long, 
because they are fed and guarded by some human 
anxiety, thus man in his shadowed years beholds 



23 

many lights of love that are lighted and guarded by 
a hand unseen. 

In the painter's landscape there is always de- 
manded some form of life, — a lamb, a bird, a 
domestic animal ; because these can care for man. 
Thus the cattle become greater than the meadows. 
In one of Emerson's little poems the squirrel is 
greater than the mountain. In Dante's vast work, 
the celestial forest is less touching than the birds 
which, through the woods of Chiassi, rolled their 
gathering melody. In such a world there is some 
care greater still behind these little forms of life and 
love; a love-sun of which all other sympathies 
are only the reflected rays, as the clouds are often 
touched with a light that has not fully come. In the 
gigantic landscape of humanity there must be seen 
the living form of God. His foot-prints must be 
seen in the hills ; His divine song must be heard in 
the summer and autumnal branches. 

Last May, when that rich month was hurrying 
toward the greater wealth of June, death claimed 
suddenly one from this congregation; one of the 
greatest minds and one of the kindest hearts that 
even our good age ever gives to any one of its 



24 

children. When the coffin had been lowered into 

the earth, and religion and love had joined in the 

final amen, many strong men were reluctant to 

leave the place and desert the form that had, for 

long years, been near in such manly magnificence. 

Such a being did not seem made for the tomb. He 

seemed too great for such a rest in the ground. But 

as the living group turned away from the scene, one 

thought came to all, — God cares for our dead. 

Falling statesman, sinking friend, dying woman, 

pale, sleeping child, pass from human sight, but 

only to fall into that divine, tender solicitude which 

is hidden from us by the rich but heavy curtains of 

nature. The perpetual exodus from our homes, 

our church, our fields of common friendship, is to 

be explained only by the great invitation that comes 

to the dying from some better land. As they all 

came into this being by a Creator's goodness, by 

the path of that goodness they all depart. 

Who leads through trackless space the stars of night? 

The power that made them guards them still; 
They know Him not, yet, day and night, 
They do His perfect will; 
Unchanged by age, 

They hold on high 
Their pilgrimage 
Of glory round the sky. 



25 

Go, meditate with man among the tombs, 

And there the end of all things view; 
Visit, with man, spring's earliest bloom 
And see all things made new; 
Thence rapt, aloof, 

In ecstacy, 
Hear, from heaven's roof, 
Stars preach eternity. 



Gone Beyond the Veil 

JJermon 

By DAVID SWING, 

PASTOR OF CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO. 

December 28, 1890. 



Copyright 1891, by Wm. A. Talcott. 



u 'THERE are voices before you, outreaching hands, 

loved ones waiting. When the time shall come 

for you to die, you will go from this world more 

willin ^-" -Swing. 



Sermon. 



Go to now, ye that say : To-day or to-morrow we will go 
into this city and spend a year there, and trade and get 
gain : whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. 
What is your life? For ye are a vapor that appeareth 
for a little time and then vanisheth away. For ye ought 
to say : If the Lord will, we shall live and do this or that. 

—James iv. 13. 

The savage tribes do not keep any record of 
their seasons and personal birthdays. The early 
Indians of our continent kept some rude records of 
events the most prosperous or adverse. The moon 
was generally their unit of measurement. The sun 
was not so evident in his movements. The moon, 
which at times grew full in the face and then waned, 
was the most available clock for all those wild men 
who occupied this continent for unreckoned years. 
Each separate day was a fragment too small to be 
counted, and the movements of the sun north of 
the equator were beyond the red man's grasp. It 
is not probable any of the uncivilized races ever 
paid much regard to the exact age of an individual. 
We were young, now we are old, was a statement 



32 

exact enough to suit the chieftains who had seen 
many moons and many hunting seasons and many 
battles. It is certain that with them, as with the 
negroes, their personal record of age was often ten 
or twenty years away from the truth. 

The more exact measurement of time could not 
have come at the demand of commercial interests 
alone, nor at the command only of that intellect 
which loves to measure exactly all objects, but the 
effort must have been stimulated not a little by the 
joy or soberness of that kind of knowledge which 
tells each one how long he has been in the world. 
The moment mental culture came man began to 
count more carefully his summers and winters ; and 
when the mind had become brilliant enough to 
compose the ninetieth psalm, it had become so 
proud or sad over life that it could say, " The days 
of our years are three score years and ten." In the 
culture which adorned the classic lands each one 
numbered carefully his years, but the months and 
days were seldom written down. Socrates died at 
70, Sophocles at 90, Demosthenes at about 60. 
With the expanse of literature and all thought and 
feeling, the month and day began to appear in the 



33 

record. Life grew more precious as it ran. Virgil 
died on the 22d of September, 19 B. C, in his 51st 
year; Horace died on the 19th of November, in 
the 8th year, B. C, at the age of 57. Augustus 
Caesar died August 19, 14 B. C. Such details we 
must not ascribe to more exact astronomy or to 
better timepieces, but to the growing appreciation of 
the greatness and marvel of existence. One might 
think the exactness of count came from the desire 
of the mercantile world to be true to its contract, 
were it not for that solicitude which marks the min- 
ute even when a loved one falls into the last sleep. 
The more man thinks, the more strange becomes 
every single fact in the incident of death. 

The close of a year cannot but bring to us all 
the half -sad thought that our visit to this earth is 
drawing nearer and nearer to its close. To the 
youngest this reflection cannot so reasonably come, 
but soon after one has passed the middle line, the 
meditation reappears whenever the autumn leaves 
strew the ground, and whenever the Christmas fes- 
tival has passed by. Much depends upon the sensi- 
bility of the heart, for when Bryant was only 
eighteen years old, he said to the world there 



34 

Comes a still voice — Yet a few days and thee 
The all-beholding sun shall see no more 
In all his course, nor yet in the cold ground 
Where thy pale form was laid with many tears, 
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist 
Thy image. 

The Author of life and death so laid His plans 
that youth itself is always kept under the shadow 
of that impending night. As though the mind 
would be wisest when it were most sober, and would 
be most kind when most humble, God ordered that 
no thoughtful person would ever dare say, " I shall 
live another year ; older persons will die, but 1 shall 
live." Of one million who look out of the win- 
dows in infancy, and point to the moon and stars as 
so many toys within easy reach, in thirty years four 
hundred thousand have passed from the doors and the 
windows. Five hundred thousand have gone before 
the fiftieth year has come. For mental, and, perhaps, 
religious reasons, the Author of humanity has made 
all minds which are capable of thought move along in 
the midst of the one-thrilling uncertainty. It may, 
perhaps, deepen a little when white hairs have come, 
but the shadow is a great one, able to becloud not a 



35 

little the sky of each. As the twilight in the sum- 
mer touches all objects alike, tree and grass, valley 
and mountain, subduing the green of the meadows 
and the gaudy poppies in the wheat, spreading a 
veil over the lakes and rivers, taking away the spots 
and flaunting plumes of the birds, thus the fact of 
mortality is a widespread eventide which dims the 
color of gold, of fame, of ambition, and subdues 
not a little the lustre of beauty's eye and the roses 
on her cheek. This eventide of death is as old and 
broad as human reflection. We cannot go back in 
history far enough to find a spot where the grave is 
not playing its part in soliloquy and in all public 
literature. Cicero said, " Death may come to-day. 
It is always hanging over us like the stone over 
Tantalus." Tibullus said, " Why should men kill 
each other in war ? Soon enough would they all 
go to that black region where there are no fields of 
wheat, no trailing vines ? " It is a pressure as ex- 
tensive and as uniform as that of the atmosphere, 
but a weight of sadness. 

Reports often come to us of persons who, in 
full health and prosperity, express a willingness to 
give up this existence. A very large majority of 



36 

these persons are insincere. Their words are not 
the pictures of facts, but only the sketches drawn 
by untaught fancies. Should death offer his ser- 
vices nearly all of this multitude would plead some 
reason for his delay. This world and the human 
heart are wonderfully entangled. Often when a 
youth or an adult must only change his nation or 
move away from places made dear by childhood, 
tears fall. The heart is attached to each being and 
each object. 

When the twenty-five early years have passed 
by, the soul finds itself chained to all objects, the 
greatest and the least. The boys who used to 
hunt in the thickets and woods for the wild blue- 
grape, often found the grapes far up in the top of a 
great tree. It was then the resolve of youthful 
vandalism to cut off the vine at the ground, and 
then by the power of a dozen hands detach it from 
the oak or the beech. It leaves its old home with 
reluctance, for it has wound itself around many 
branches, and the tendrils of the vine have estab- 
lished long and strong friendships with the twigs 
and boughs. When, at last, the vine falls to the 
earth the air is full of the leaves and grapes which 



37 

are detached by the thoughtless violence. Each 
torn leaf, each grape in the shower was a tear over 
the cruelty of the separation. Thus the heart be- 
comes attached in youth to its home and native 
land, and, if it must remove over the mountains, 
or over the sea, then does it reveal its sweet entan- 
glements, and its removal recalls in the sad soul the 
memory of the vine and its giant tree. 

But if the mind is thus wedded to its farm or 
home or country, with what language can we de- 
scribe man's attachments to his life in this world. 
In addition to the indescribable instinct of life which 
man shows together with all the dumb animals, 
there exists a most marvelous mental enchainment 
of the mind to this world. When man thinks of 
parting with the sun and moon, with winter and 
summer, with all that is good and beautiful in 
nature, and with his friends and home and loved 
ones, then does he betray a solemnity and sadness 
which no language can portray. It is seldom any 
educated being in good health of body lives without 
these gold fetters and is willing that this day should 
be the last. 

All persons ought to love very deeply this world, 



38 

because, made by an infinite power and wisdom, it 
should be confessed to be a home worthy of its 
Creator, — a place marked by the infinite. The 
earth should seem a part of a tremendous plan, 
and each day on its bosom should seem a day 
spent amid beauties and wonders. Has any mind 
ever been too great for this terrestrial hour ? Has 
any statesman been too wise for the need of the 
people ? Has any art excelled the sunset or the sea, 
or equaled its own ideals. Has any one sung too 
sweetly for our planet ? Has any orator uttered 
the truth too truly and too well ? Has civilization 
exhausted all high motives and performed its high 
duties ? Has wealth become too benevolent ? Has 
each man become the brother of all men? Have 
the flowers lost their color? Has the next June 
ceased to haunt the chambers of Hope ? What an 
infinite world ! And why should any child of mor- 
tality wish to go from this world to-day or to-mor- 
row ? The wisdom and power of God meet here 
to chain man's foot to this earthly shore. Man is 
not foolishly attached to his life; he is divinely 
bound. Great friendships, great duties, and noble 
purposes make man seem a part of the very world 
itself. 



39 

Notwithstanding these many and powerful 
chains, yet each human being must, in the plan of 
God, be taken from this globe. Man does not wil- 
lingly go ; he is taken. As an unseen force made 
the suns and the planets, and covered all or some of 
the planets with verdure and life, as an unseen force 
placed man here, so that power comes in some 
unknown manner and separates man's soul from 
his body. The God of the beginning is the God 
of the end. It is not that man goes, but that God 
comes. Man is not an independent being ; he is a 
piece of a plan. 

Forbidden to be anxious to go, man is permitted 
to bow in philosophic submission. He must so live 
as not to make death self -brought. He must live 
as in the midst of laws which a God has enacted, 
and he must assume their wisdom. No law of life 
was passed that it might be broken, but only that it 
might be obeyed. While any child of mortality is 
standing amid all the laws, duties, and pleasures of 
the world, it need not be willing, indeed, to go out 
of this life ; but should the order come, it may well 
be submissive, as though the God of nature were 
present in person in the summons. The greatness 



40 

of the summons may make the order read the more 
sweetly to the heart. In the world of the atheist 
such submission would seem more difficult. There 
is no divine voice in the last hour. But, as we are 
not in this temple in the name of atheism, we need 
not plan for it a philosophy of the tomb. 

All that the sojourner of time can do is not to 
trifle with his life, not to expose a delicately 
wrought frame and mind to the rudeness of any 
vice. As the palm tree must obey the laws of its 
structure, and cannot be transplanted into the North- 
ern zone, so man must live in obedience to the laws 
of his body and soul. He must stand encompassed 
by the ways and means appointed by nature, the 
physical and spiritual ways of wisdom, and then 
come when death may, it will be the simple voice 
of God, and submission will be within the spirit's 
reach. The sinking life needs nothing so much as 
the feeling that it " has done what it could, it has 
attempted to live according to the laws of the body 
and the mind, it has carried carefully over land and 
sea, amid rock and amid flowers, the delicate urn of 
life. It has done what it could." 

All of the great Greeks found a final peace in 



41 

the thought that death was only the call of the 
supreme God. In the drama of OEdipus, this 
theory of the divine presence plays its powerful 
part. Antigone had long been leading by the hand 
her blind father the exiled king. When at last they 
had sat down in a sacred place, the daughter was 
allured a few steps away from her idolized parent, 
and while she was thus detained there was a vivid 
flash of lightning and an awful thundering. When 
the daughter trembled with these sounds, and had, 
perhaps, heard the mysterious, invisible chorus say- 
ing, " How terribly the thunder rolls around," she 
ran toward the sacred place, but, in that tumult, her 
father had passed away from the world. She and 
the king had sat down where the bay tree, the 
olive, and the vine mingled and were full of night- 
ingales ; but into that sweet bower death had come, 
not as a deformity, but as a sublime uprising of the 
entire scene. All was transfigured. The death was 
in harmony with the olive trees, the thunder in full 
accord with the songs of the birds, and life and death 
were one. The father and daughter, united or sep- 
arated, were one, because all the scene came alike 
from the same God. In God all the details met. 



42 

This repose in Greek philosophy reappears in 
that of Jesus Christ, only in the religion of Jesus 
the love surpasses the display of simple power. The 
awful thunder disappears, and the olive trees remain 
in a more silent beauty. The Greek force is lost in 
the Christian goodness. Now God, as the hymn 
says, " Lets the lifted thunder drop," and " Jesus 
weeps and loves me still." The nightingales still 
sing in the bay trees, in the olives, and the vines ; 
nothing being absent except the terrific thunderings. 

The exit from this existence is made the more 
peaceful by its universality. If some few mortals 
were to be exempt from death, we should all be 
filled with daily anxiety as to whether we were to 
be among the doomed ones. In the decree which 
declares that all, all must die, there is whispered to 
each heart many a word of peace. The past cen- 
turies with their once happy millions, now all dust, 
with their kings and subjects, the rich and the poor, 
the learned and the unlettered, with their Homers 
and their Caesars, their apostles and their martyrs, 
all in one wide grave, silence all the rising protests 
in the hearts now living, and make every head bow 
and repeat softly the words, " I know that I too 



43 

must go the way whence I shall never return." In 
the inevitable there is peace. 

The immensity of the human race far back of us, 
its absence now, the marks of its chariot wheels in the 
streets of Pompeii, the work upon its statues and 
Corinthian columns of hands that are now motion- 
less, the poems of a Virgil who is not here, the annals 
of a Julius Cassar whose armies no longer march, 
the crusaders who are no longer moving proudly 
toward Palestine, the paintings of the Sistine Chapel 
from whose splendor the artist has gone away, 
the homes of Shakespeare and Scott long since 
deserted by their occupants, the entire seventeenth 
century, which, holding in its hands the new destiny 
of the human mind, is not here to wear upon its 
forehead a single wreath of the now living grati- 
tude, all combine to proclaim the breadth of that 
avenue which leads the human millions forever 
from their earthly homes. Its breadth amounts to 
a grandeur. The isolated soul of the nineteenth 
century need not shrink from obeying the call to 
journey along the road so full of human footprints, 
and, for the most part, so bordered with altars 
erected to the name of God. 



44 

The resignation to go whither all the past has 
journeyed is made more perfect by the thought that 
along this dignified and almost magnificent highway 
many of the friends of each one now living have 
already gone. One by one, for ten, or twenty, or 
a half hundred years, the loved ones have been 
passing out of sight, going in the power of man- 
hood or womanhood, or in radiant youth or in 
childhood's innocence. 

When man has reached seventy the friends who 
have passed away are more in number and in sacred- 
ness than those who remain. As in the late Septem- 
ber the blossoms in garden and field are only a few 
compared with those whose leaves caught the sun 
and showers of midsummer, thus man standing on 
the extreme confine of his life notes that the near 
ones on earth are but a few compared with those 
who, to friendship's roll-call, would have to answer 
from the fields of heaven. 

To this philosophy of resignation, which has 
comforted all the civilized lands of all ages, Chris- 
tianity adds only additional power and charm. It 
does not harm the submission which mankind had 
before it came, nor does it take away what peace in 



45 

God the mind may possess which has not accepted 
of a revelation. It is only a vast accession to the 
bulk of human life, — an answer to the longings of 
all who have stood amid the mysteries of life and 
death. Christ did not come to oppose the hope of 
a Socrates or an Aurelius, but to increase its influ- 
ence in the later hearts. Our sun differs from a 
twinkling star only in being nearer. The sun is so 
near that our planet exults in its light and heat. 
Thus, before Christ, heaven was made dim by an 
awful distance ; after Him it drew nearer, and 
seemed to reveal to many eyes its sapphire gates. 
The stream of the Bible empties into the general 
river of religious thought, and makes it flow toward 
eternity with redoubled volume. Under the leader- 
ship of Jesus of Nazareth, the subsequent centuries 
have thought more ardently and more wisely about 
the possibilities beyond the grave. In that spiritual 
awakening reason also was aroused, and with the 
deepening of thought came a more general feeling 
that man was to pass from this life to a better world. 
Christ has been at once a leader of reason, of piety, 
and of hope. 

And yet, although for thousands of years man- 



46 

kind has pondered over this phenomenon of death, 
it retains its awful solemnity and checks all the 
egotism of the thoughtful mind. St. James says : 
" Oh, how foolish is man. He says : ' I will go 
into the city and spend a year there and get gain,' 
whereas he does not know what shall be on the 
morrow." But St. James understated the real truth, 
for the little child also says: "To-morrow I shall 
play with my cousin or my schoolmate ; " and 
behold the child is buried on the morrow, and its 
toys are on its tomb. We cannot picture only the 
silver-haired as making these plans that fail. Upon 
our canvas we must paint the bride, the school -girl, 
the student, the infant, as overtaken by this strange 
storm. If you recall any noble hero of four-score 
years, you must see his grave as being near that of 
some boy who was in his first days at school, or 
of some girl whose cheek was rosy-red. Burke, 
Hallam, Lincoln followed far behind beloved children. 
This path is full of little footprints. For each aged 
one who goes to heaven, there is a group of youth 
to wave the welcome from the jewelled walls. Thus 
reaching out its arms toward old and young, the 
porch of the philosopher and the cradle of the 



47 

infant, Death gathers us all up in its sweeping 
mystery, rebukes our pride, and mingles all our 
smiles with tears. Amazing event which only a 
God can fathom ! 

We need not dim the wonderful sunshine of 
these final December days with any foolish or 
childish weeping, but we should possess the religion 
and the human affection that can read over in our 
hearts the names of those whom the- year has let 
fall as it has run. 

The Bar Association of this city has lost eighteen 
of its brotherhood since last New Year's Day. Each 
month issued its call. January placed three under 
her snows; May placed two under her flowers. 
But the Bar Association only illustrates that greater 
association, society itself, to which we all belong. 
Composed of all ages and pursuits it makes a 
greater catalogue of its dead. From this church 
association many have passed away, some amid 
public lamentings, others under a shower of hidden 
tears. The great, the good, the kind, the generous, 
the young, the middle-aged, the old have alike 
gone. To eulogize the noble men who are absent 
to-day would be to slight the usefulness and infinite 



48 

self-denial of the womanhood that has fallen into 
this sleep. 

To name these daughters of God would be to. 
slight the little children who have had to fold little 
hands on their innocent but dying hearts. Oratory 
itself would not know where to speak its kindest 
words, whether over the coffin of a judge or great 
lawyer, or over the white face of the dead child. As 
when a ship sails with many on board, whom we 
on the shore both know and love, we cannot fling 
many words to each one across the widening waters, 
as we must simply wave one farewell to all; so 
to-day as we see this group of exiles leaving the 
flowers of May, the harvests of August, and the 
colored leaves of autumn forever, we can only wave 
one farewell to all and commit them all alike to 
the ocean, on either shore of which lies the king- 
dom of God. Farewell. 

The immensity of this migration of our race, 
the mental and moral quality of those dying gene- 
rations, the thoughts they have, the hopes they 
cherish, the hymns they sing, the infiniteness of the 
soul justify the belief that man dying passes to 
some nobler country. 



49 

As many a day which darkly dawns 
And shadows forth a world of cares 

With sudden light grows clear and bright, 
And noon a sun-gold crownlet wears, 

Thus shall it be with eyes tear-wet, 
The heart shall find its Eden yet. 



The Power of an Endless Life 

JJermon 

By DAVID SWING, 

PASTOR OF CENTRAL CHURCH, CHICAGO. 



Easter Day, March 29, 
i89i. 




Copyright 1891, by Wm. A. Talcott. 



" "\X7HAT are the associations with waters, land, 

flowers, clouds, grass, the perfumes of the 

air, compared with those ties which bind us to 

minds which can think and weep, and love and 

" " — Swing. 



JSetmon. 

Through the power of an endless life. — Hebrews vii. 17. 
Having parted company with the Hebrews, Paul 
very naturally made frequent attempts to justify his 
own course, and to induce his countrymen to imi- 
tate his example. But the Hebrews had a most 
strict law demanding that all priests should come 
from the tribe of Levi. For .many centuries these 
high officials had thus come. In the face of such 
a law and such a history, Paul had adopted as the 
Most High Priest the Jesus from the tribe of Judah. 
After a long and intricate argument, little appreci- 
ated by our age, Paul reached the conclusion that 
Jesus was High Priest, not because of any high re- 
lationship to courtly flesh, but because of the power 
of an endless life. If it conferred nobility to be 
born a Levite and die a Levite, it ought to confer a 
greater honor to have an endless being, dating far 
back of any human tribe, and running onward with- 
out finding a tomb. The career of every Levite had 
been terminated by death, but the life of this new 
High Priest was indissoluble. He came to His office 
by the power of an endless life. 



56 

In the long flight of years Paul's argument about 
the legitimacy of priests has lost its early signifi- 
cance. The name and a few of the ceremonies of 
the priest still remain in some branches of the Chris- 
tian Church, but the name and person are only a 
faded and dull picture of that religious scene out of 
which St. Paul was attempting to emerge. What 
remains to us of most significance is the simple 
phrase : " By the power of an endless life." Paul's 
Greek word is not the term " endless," but the term 
" indissoluble." 

Upon an Easter Sunday there should well come 
an hour sacred to reflections over the idea that man 
is destined to live again beyond this world. It 
should not deter him from such reflections that he 
cannot prove his own immortality ; that he cannot 
dispel every objection and doubt, and see another 
life as clearly as he sees this. In all directions man 
experiences great difficulty in measuring himself. 
He does not know what mind may be, how the eye 
sees when its transcript of the image travels within 
the total darkness of the brain, how the ear hears, 
nor how the cells in the brain can remember and 
reason. A person of eighty years will remember 



57 



vividly some scene or some incident that took place 
seventy-five years ago — the brain in the meantime 
having changed several times all its component parts. 
That mysterious brain will with ease hold countless 
ideas gathered from every department of knowledge, 
and will know quite well the date at which the infor- 
mation was received. 

All efforts to analyze the mind and learn what it 
is, where it is located, how it acts in the brain tis- 
sues, have been made in vain — the greatest scientist 
differing but little from the prattle of an inquiring 
child. The inability of man to measure himself 
does not prove to him that he is to be reckoned an 
immortal, but it should prevent him from being 
angry or surprised over the problem of the future, 
and should make it absurd for him to deny that he 
will live once more. If a being so wonderfully 
made as man does not know how he came to this 
life, and what his life is, it is only a confirmed ego- 
tism that can profess to know that there is no here- 
after for the human race. As there is no room for 
such egotism, so is there little room for depression 
on account of the absence of proof, for the dark- 
ness which envelops the soul here upon earth 



58 

should make us all expect the future of man to be 
enveloped in a similar cloud. If man cannot see 
this life face to face, why should he expect any face- 
to-face interview with some future condition ? The 
heart does not ask a perfect vision in some one 
direction when at all other compass points it is 
denied. 

A good resolve for such an Easter morning is 
never to underrate the argument and hope of a 
second life. No heart is justified in saying more 
than that it is too wonderful for its power; but 
when eloquent lips declare that the whole doctrine 
of immortality is the result of the natural dreams 
and hopes of a fairyland they become irrational in 
their very effort to be the children of pure science 
and reason. In that little poetic episode from 
Mr. Robert J. Ingersoll, which begins thus: 

" Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren 
peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond 
the heights; we cry aloud, the only answer is the echo of 
our wailing cry;" — 

there is an error of statement which may per- 
haps have created or confirmed a despair for many. 
One of those barren peaks of the two eternities has 



59 

never sent back the echo of our wailing cry. The 
" Peak " which rises up before man came to earth 
has always been eloquent in loving kindness. No 
heart has ever sent toward it a "wailing cry." 
Science has looked toward the beginning of. the 
human race with all the interest which attends a 
profound mystery, but it has never " wailed "as it 
looked. The most joyful scene and thought is that 
of the origin of the universe and its life. If over 
the coming of life the morning stars sang together, 
if, now, man either in his science or his poetry looks 
back toward the creation as toward the most sub- 
limely beautiful fact of which the mind can con- 
ceive, by what law of logic or fancy is such an 
amazing retrospect to be called a " wailing cry ? " 
Of Mr. Ingersoll's " two peaks " one of them at 
least is gorgeously beautiful. But there is another 
defect in the assumed gem. The eternity out of 
which man came does not send back to humanity 
the echo of its " wailing cry," for when man inter- 
rogates the past eternity about whence he came, 
that awful peak casts aside all its coldness and bar- 
renness and says: Dear child, it is of no value 
whence you came ; you are here ! It says to 



60 

Angelo: Do not wail because you do not know 
whence your mind came; let it fill you with joy 
that it reached your bosom! Thus one of these 
peaks instead of being adamant laughs and exults 
with man over the infinite beauty and reality of 
existence. The real truth is it is the matchless 
splendor of the gate through which humanity came 
that creates the sadness about the gate to which 
he goes. Life is therefore not a vale between two 
cold and barren eternities but a vale between two 
eternities, one of which possesses such measureless 
beauty that it compels man to think of the other 
only with tears. 

We must, therefore, on these Easter days never 
underrate man's existence. Better and truer than 
the poetic thought of Mr. Ingersoll would be a poem 
which should picture man as standing between two 
mountain walls, one of which should be covered 
with verdure, song, and with the Morning angels, 
and should send back to all inquirers the words, 
"You are here in life." Before the other wall 
humanity might send a " wailing cry," but a sigh 
mingled with the hope that the God who could 
place man in such a beautiful valley could also get 



61 

him out. Why should man see magnificence back 
of his race and only desolation in front ? If 
humanity could reach this amazing world without 
knowing how it came, it can reach another in an 
unknown way. 

The modern soul must be on its guard also, lest 
to the despairing poetry and eloquence of much 
American and German literature, science shall add 
still more of humiliation and distrust. It is common 
to say and feel that in presence of modern science 
man sinks into only one of the animal species ; that 
he must take his position among those cellular struct- 
ures which are called organic forms. But what kind 
of an organic form is that which can analyze all other 
animals, all other organisms ? study them ? classify 
them ? Did the birds ever write a history of Audu- 
bon ? Have the brutes ever written a history of 
Cuvier? Have the plants composed a history of 
Linnaeus ? Has science, indeed, compelled man to 
sink to a lower place ? Who made the sciences ? 
Instead of humiliating humanity each page in 
modern research and discovery should take the 
heart further away from the common domain of 
nature and make it seem more the child of some 



62 

distinct destiny. Instead of being only physical 
nature it contemplates nature from the outside, it 
weighs, measures, studies, classifies and governs it. 
It is not in the world ; it is outside of it, and looks 
at it. 

It is a peculiarity of all the animals that they 
are within their world just as an angle- worm is in 
the ground ; the fish is in the water, the bird in the 
air, the lion in the hot grass or hot mountains; 
but the fish does not examine the air, nor does the 
African lion study the Arctic zone or the depth of 
the sea. Man alone takes his stand apart from time 
and place, and surveys all things as a gifted specta- 
tor. He is more like a god than like the members 
of the simply cellular family. He is so isolated in 
his greatness that it may well be assumed that he 
carries within him an indissoluble life. 

Humanity is indeed so peculiar and vast that 
its production by a self-acting evolution seems abso- 
lutely incredible. It would seem impossible for the 
dusts and fluids of earth ever to toss themselves 
about in such a manner as to produce living birds, 
trees, flowers, and, at last, man. It would first be 
necessary for the atoms so to toss around as to 



6) 

make a sun and a planet before they should begin to 
struggle up toward roses, humming birds, men and 
women. In reading this long career of the rise and 
progress of a handful of dust, the average heart 
grows incredulous and demands some Mind as 
standing apart from the dust atoms. The advent- 
ures of Sinbad the Sailor are much more credible 
than the adventures of this self-acting monad. Our 
logic needs most an outside mind like the intellect 
of man, only infinite in its power. Of such a 
mind man would be the child and the sharer of 
the Father's long life in world beyond world. 

These higher estimates of man cannot betray 
him into personal vanity, for personal vanity always 
comes not from thought and truth, but from 
the absence of these things. Many a painted 
and beaded and well -feathered Indian possesses 
more vanity than was possible to a Newton 
or a Pascal. Not able to be made vain by an 
exaltation of itself, humanity must cling to a high 
self-estimate in order to escape a stricken or broken 
heart. We do not, indeed, need vanity, but we do 
all need the power of an endless life — that outlook 
for the mind, that great arena for the sensitive heart. 



64 

There is, in truth, a humility which ought to 
cry out: "What is man that God is mindful of 
him ? the son of man that God should visit him ? " 
It is no contradiction to say that man is capable of 
both humility and exaltation. When he compares 
himself to the Deity he may well hide in a cleft of 
the rock and wait for the Divine form to sweep by ; 
but when he contemplates his place in nature he 
should fall upon his knees and bless his Maker for 
the gift of such a mind and such a soul. " What a 
piece of work is man ! how noble in reason, how 
infinite in faculty; in form and moving how ex- 
press and admirable ; in action how like an angel, 
in apprehension how like a god ! the beauty of the 
world ! the paragon of animals ! " 

Astronomy, that science of immensity which 
more than the other sciences all combined over- 
whelms the mental faculties, should never cast a 
shadow upon these mortal hearts of earth. The 
devotees of science are fond of saying that our 
earth, with all its continents and oceans, is only a 
grain of sand upon a boundless shore. Our sun 
and all his system make only a dot on the field of 
space. The inference is, what then is man ? Why 



65 

should a God love him ? Why should a Christ 
love and die for the beings upon this little globe ? 
Thus science has of late years risen up against the 
assumed greatness of man. Many great and many 
minor intellects sink under this spell. The tele- 
scope amazes and at last depresses. 

All such depression is illogical, for there is no 
number or vastness of worlds that can weigh any- 
thing against the dignity and exaltation of the 
human mind. It is now said that the greatest tele- 
scope makes it certain that from earth as a point of 
observation, two hundred millions of suns are now 
visible. Each sun is perhaps larger than the one 
which creates all our summer-time. But under 
such a revelation man need not sink, neither as 
an intellectual creature nor as a being beloved of 
God, for we cannot increase the merit of material 
things by increasing their volume. If man is 
superior to a candle he is superior to a sun, and 
if he transcends one sun he transcends just as 
easily two hundred millions of them. Suppose 
you pluck a leaf from an oak and compare 
that leaf with the mind of Plato or the heart of 
Jesus. All would say Plato or Christ is greater 



66 

than your leaf. It will not help then your cause 
any to say, I shall go and bring a million leaves, 
and of all kinds, oak and laurel and rose. The 
new mountains of leaves will not change the rela- 
tions of the gifted mind to the leaf. One leaf and 
a million leaves are all one to it. So with suns and 
planets ; astronomy may estimate the suns at hun- 
dreds of millions and may tell of the awful spaces 
which light cannot cross in less than ten thousand 
years, but no such counting of stars affects in the 
least the uniqueness and grandeur of man. The 
mind of a child of six years of age surpasses in 
wonder all the suns and planets astronomers can 
count. It will be in vain for future students to 
discover a million more of fixed stars; the mind 
will still surpass all as it surpasses one. One and 
ten million suns are all the same when weighed 
against a rational heart. Instead of feeling that 
man is hidden away in a little corner of the uni- 
verse, we may well feel that he rises above all phys- 
ical things, however vast and numerous and how- 
ever far apart. When man's mind is thought of all 
distances are the same and all worlds near or far 
alike, If any of the other spheres transcend this 



67 

globe it will be in the mental and moral greatness 
in their forms of life. The size and distances of 
worlds will all go for naught. 

When we recall what beings have lived in this 
planet, what minds hungry for truth, what hearts 
ocean -like in their kindness, what a person that One 
who moved across Palestine, what disciples He had, 
what beautiful minds there were . before Jesus, 
and what a larger host has passed along since, 
what ideals have appeared on canvas, in literature, 
and still are hovering over each educated bosom 
like white doves sent from heaven, it does not seem 
difficult to believe that our earth with all its little- 
ness in the midst of infinite space may yet be a 
noble gem in the great moral empire of God. A 
little world with a soul in may be greater than large 
worlds desolate. The sun is a million miles in 
diameter. It makes a summer time, but we have 
it. Better the heart that has the summer time than 
the sun that makes it. 

If little Palestine could support a Jesus Christ, 
why should man wonder what potency there may 
be in the far-off realms of space. So far as our 
planet is defective it draws most of its defects from 



68 

that human will which would mar as quickly all 
the days and nights of the Pleiades or Orion. When 
man rises in his divine might earth responds, and 
each field and hill exalts him. When a noble mind 
walks through a spring meadow the meadow exalts 
him. The scene becomes his teacher, his poet, his 
orator, his friend. There are doubtless other inhab- 
ited worlds, but that they are greater or diviner 
than this is not clear. This world is very eloquent 
to some, and would love to be eloquent to all. 
When the mind and heart walk aright, aided by 
education and goodness, the field of wheat in June 
turns into a matin and a vesper. A human heart 
says: 

" From west to east 
The warm breath blows ; the slender heads droop low, 
As if in prayer. 

Again, more lightly tossed in merry play, 
They bend, and bow, and sway 
With measured beat, 
But never rest. 

Through shadow and through sun 
Goes on the tender rustle of the wheat. 
So soft and careless thrills the dreamer's ear ! 
Of all that was and is, of all that yet shall be 






69 

It holds a part ; 

Love, sorrow, longing, pain 

The restlessness that yearns, 

The thirst that burns, 

The bliss that like a fountain overflows, 

The deep repose, 

Good that we might have known but shall not know 

The hope God took, the joy He made complete; 

Life's chords all answer from the windswept wheat. 

There might easily be a more honorable creature 
than man, but with difficulty could there be a better 
world than this. Its mountains are sublime, its 
violets beautiful, its tones sweet. It responds to the 
human wish as the harp answers with its music to 
the fingers. The harp stands graceful and complete 
in itself. It says: All depends upon the manner 
in which you mortals touch your hand upon .my 
strings. You can sound discords, but you can for- 
ever and ever make me sing joyous or pathetic har- 
monies. By nature you cannot play my notes, but 
I am here to be studied, learned and loved, and then 
will issue from me 

" Sweetest note on mortal tongue 
Sweetest song by seraphs sung." 



70 

Thus stands our world very complete in powers 
and adaptations. It is waiting for humanity to per- 
form its half of the. divine task. When the mind 
does its whole duty by this little planet, its objects, 
from the gentlest Easter flower to the vast ocean, 
contribute something to its education and happiness. 
The scene then expands and possesses all the mag- 
nificence of a picture of God's children in God's 
world. But this little planet has no rewards for 
those who trifle with its high laws and high pur- 
suits. However vast the universe is there cannot be 
a planet or a fixed star which will offer any happi- 
ness for those who, instead of making music break 
the harp, and instead of walking religiously, love 
to trample the Easter lilies under foot. 

Having looked thus at man and his earth, what 
remains to complete the greatness of the scene? 
Only one thing, — that there shall lie under him in 
all these years the power of an endless life. He 
does not want nor seem to need a life which may 
soon dissolve. He needs the power of an indissol- 
uble existence. Society needs the moral concep- 
tion and inspiration found in the belief in immor- 
tality. Our law, our right, our charity, our friend- 



71 

ship, our religion, our inexpressible attachment, ask 
for ages, not for days. 

You are all justified in believing that a vision so 
grand and so useful will come true; you are all 
justified in believing that such a globe full of sea- 
sons and covered with sunbeams, full of love and 
thought is not simply a place in which a Christ may 
die, but a place from which his soul arises ; you are 
justified in asking all the flowers of all the fields, 
and the spring sunbeams that make them, to assure 
you that under you and all whom you love flows 
the power of an endless life. 



" Wonderful as is man's coming from the Father and 
his coming into the world of the Father, his going away 
is more wonderful still; more wonderful, not because a 
greater event in mystery, but because it lies before us 
instead of behind us. To go to a heaven is really no more 
wonderful than to have come hither. A heaven is no more 
difficult than an earth. The peculiarity of death rests chiefly 
in the fact that it lies in the near future to each of us, and 
not in the mighty past, and the fact that death is my mystery, 
and not that of the creation of the universe. We all admit 
that the creation of suns and planets with their innumerable 
details required a God who could easily care for his children, 
but the grave differs from the rest of the universe in its 
being for you, and not long hence for you and your children. 
It is this personal application of death that gives it its ten- 
fold mystery and grief. Your grave in the grass is more 
tearful than the universe, because that grave is your own. 



(73) 



" In these moments of sad revery man must take refuge 
with Christ in the thought of going away to the Father. If 
man came from the Father, into the world of the Father, he 
should calmly feel that he will go away to the Father. All 
that man is or has came from God. Mind and soul and 
world came from the one source. There is not a blossom that 
is not of God's planting, not a stalk of wheat God did not 
sow. Thus, God-led into the world, and the world being 
that of the same God, each upright heart dying ought to 
say: 'And now I go away to the Father.' The divine form 
back of the human race, the divine laws around man's feet, 
should command each noble child of mortality to feel that 
beyond the grave there are divine arms kindly outreached." 

— Suing. 



(74) 



A)/ 



